T he Royal Commonwealth Pool might be the only venue in Games history to host events on three separate occasions, but in 44 years of douce and loyal service to the Edinburgh diving community it had never heard a roar like the one that erupted just before 7pm last night.

Anyone dawdling down the Dalkeith Road would probably have assumed it had something to do with Tom Daley, such has been the hoopla surrounding his appearance in the capital this week. But the acclaim was actually for one of Edinburgh's own, 18-year-old Grace Reid, every inch the city's own mermaid but for the want of a tail.

At that moment, Reid held second place in the women's 1m springboard event. Against a stellar field, the form book had not just been ripped up, its pieces had been scattered in the pool and had drifted down through the water. As she stepped on the board, she had a medal in her grasp. A few seconds later, it had sunk to the bottom as well.

It was not that she performed the back one and-a-half somersault particularly badly, rather that the dive's degree of difficulty was too low to protect her place. Later, she would call it her go-to dive, but the 48.3 points it brought her effectively sent her into reverse and she finished fifth in a field led by Canada's Jennifer Abel in the gold medal position.

Was she disappointed? Not at all. "I came into this wanting to get a PB [personal best]," she beamed, "and I have surpassed that and got a blooming good PB. It is just the way my list works out that [the last dive] is the easier dive, but it is a more solid one.

"So when I was feeling nervous I kind of relaxed into that whereas if I had something a bit harder it may not have gone so well and I would not have got such a good PB."

As for the crowd, Reid's suggestion that they were "literally lifting me up off the board" might not have been spot-on semantically, but there was no question that she was feeding off their energy.

"Oh my goodness," she gasped of the reception she had been given. "They were really loud, louder than the last time I was here.

"Honestly, they were brilliant. I saw so many Scottish flags, so I was feeling well proud. It was the nicest feeling to be there. The more experience I get at these Games I just go higher and higher."

Yet as wonderful as the atmosphere was when Reid performed, there was an entirely different crackle when Daley stepped into the arena. Suddenly, the seats that had been embarrassingly empty at too many of the earlier sessions had eager occupants, none more eager than Anna Davis and her sons Alistair and Aiden.

"We've been scrounging around trying to get tickets," said Davis. She had spent hours on the internet and had gone through various ballots to secure seats, and had only got the third one she wanted late yesterday morning. "We were desperate to see him," she smiled.

Yet all that desperation didn't seem to lift Daley as much as it had helped Reid. In the men's synchronised 10m platform competition, he and dive partner James Denny got off to a solid enough start, but a series of errors - mostly by Denny - dropped them to the bottom of the scoreboard. With only four pairs competing. Games rules meant there was no bronze medal to be won.

If Daley and Denny, still last with one dive remaining, were going to get anything then they would have to do something pretty special. Which is exactly what they did.

A forward four-and-a-half somersault demands an awful lot of birling in the space of a 10-metre drop, but the English duo nailed it superbly. They sliced into the water in perfect unison, and when they resurfaced a second or two later the audience were still screaming with delight.

The effort shot them back to the top. The would subsequently be knocked off that position by Australian duo Domonic Bedggood and Matthew Mitcham, but it was a brilliant silver by the Englishmen.

"It was one of those last-minute decisions that we made to do it," said Daley. "We managed to do it and we're pretty happy with the way that we performed. It's agonisingly close and we know that, but it's one of those things.

"We're a new pair. We've only ever done three training sessions together. Friday, Monday and today, before competition. That was the fifth repetition of each of our dives that we've done and that was in competition.

"So we're pretty happy with the way that we dived. If we'd been told that we would get a silver medal and do the dive that we did at the end, we'd have been like 'yeah, okay, whatever'. We managed to pull it out when it counted."

To be honest, there were many in the crowd who were far less excited by the technicalities of the final dive than they were by the sight of Daley's burnished torso. And last year's famous coming-out video, when he revealed on YouTube that he was in a relationship with a man, does not seem to have diminished that ardour significantly.

"I've seen the video," said 17-year-old Grace Flaherty, who had travelled from London with sisters Freya and Aisling to see him.

"But I still love him. I want to marry him in fact."